$40,000 In One Weekend

I didn't want to just do a "One year later" type update, so I waited for something good to come along instead.

This is that post!

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Black Friday

Last year I didn't do a single Black Friday promotion. I was burned out with all the other affiliate offers I was getting and decided I wanted to set myself a part. I didn't want my business to look like just another affiliate pimping all the BF offers out there.

Probably a mistake though, I could have cashed in.

Fast forward to this year, and I didn't want to do a Black Friday offer again. Why? Well, partly through personal choice, partly through wanting to look "superior" to Black Friday, and partly because I didn't really know what to do for it.

For those of you who don't know, I sell my own products, services really, and so while many people here cleaned up as affiliates during Black Friday, I was on the other end, as the company doing the promotion, much like WA does.

However, over the course of November, several things changed my mind, and I decided to do a promotion:

Sales had been slow for the first 2-3 weeks. I realized that people were getting ready for BF, even if I wasn't. Some of them might even have been hoping I'd do a promo (I did get a few emails about this from customers and affiliates alike).

I have been planning to launch an additional service to supplement my existing one, and I thought this would be a perfect time to test the demand for it.

This would also force me to actually get that extra service completed rather than just putting it off every month.

I've read a few books on launches recently and figured I'd put my new knowledge to good use.

I put together a simple offer:

Buy a done-for-you affiliate site from us over the weekend of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and get lifetime access to my new service for free.

It was a pretty good offer and would save people hundreds of dollars, but I still had a bit of fear. I hadn't tested the demand for the additional service, so if people weren't interested in it, the whole promotion would bomb.

When you own your own products, you have more irrational fears about messing up by discounting them, doing a promo that fails, or finding out that people don't like them anymore.

When you put that irrational fear together with the fact that November had been slow (like 40% revenue compared to previous months), I was going into Black Friday a bit worried.

Would people be interested in my offer? Would they care that I was bringing out a new service? Would I be able to generate interest over the noise of all the other companies doing Black Friday promos?

Would I be able to write good enough sales copy with only three days to prepare? Etc etc. The list goes on.

Only one way to find out though right?

Implementing The Offer

So the first thing I did was write a blog post outlining the offer, what people would get out of it, and the rules for qualifying. I did this about three days before Black Friday.

In a way, it was kind of weird putting together a promotion for a service we hadn't even rolled out yet. This whole thing was kind of like "Buy a site from us and get access to something we've not created yet".

Pre-selling is actually very simple if you manage expectations. I said several times over the course of the promotion that the new service was coming out at the end of the year, so everybody would know they were buying for something not out yet (Hey they were getting a site as well though).

I then sent an email out to my list (about 4,000 subscribers) letting them know about the post and the offer.

I wanted to gauge the response, and also wanted people to start getting ready to buy. I actually still had a huge fear that nobody would buy, but I had done enough of this type of email to know that it works well, so I had to go through the motions and try to push doubt to the back of my mind.

At this point, you're probably wondering how someone "successful" can still have doubts. It's simple really. If you're doing anything worth doing, you're going to have a fear of failure. What you get better at is coping with that fear.

Building Up Hype

I sent one more email about 5 hours before midnight EST on Thanksgiving. I wasn't sure if people would be reading emails during TG or not, but I got some pretty good metrics:

(There's always someone who complains you emailed them after they signed up to your list and gave you permission to email them..)

The purpose of this email was to tell people what time we were launching the promo, what time we were "opening the cart" as such. It was also just an easy excuse to remind people about it.

Again, I was also using these emails to gauge interest. So far, about a dozen or so people replied to my emails asking about the offer, but most of them were existing customers asking if they would qualify, or if they'd need to buy again to get the offer. That was a good sign, but not necessarily indicative of the overall sentiment.

Pressing The Next Send Button

When the time finally came to send the "We are live" email, once again I was pretty nervous. I felt like this was going to make or break my month, and now that I have something like $25,000 in monthly expenses (yes. really) there's more pressure to make sure you get a good result.

At this point, we'd already made enough money in November to cover expenses, so there was no fear that my people wouldn't get paid, I just didn't want to have no money left over for myself!

I needn't have worried, because I had put together a good offer, and people love it.

After I sent the email, I waited about 40 minutes before checking the results. I didn't want to be going crazy waiting for the first sales to come in, so I left it long enough (I hoped) to see a few results.

The Results

After 40 minutes, I wanted to see that maybe 5 people had bought a site. This would be a good sign for the weekend.

We actually made 14 sales in that first 40 minutes (About $9k in revenue) and over the course of Black Friday weekend, we made a total of 55 sales, bringing us just under $40,000 in revenue. As you can see below, $20,000 of that was on the 25th alone.

It wasn't all profit of course, delivering the service we sold has its own costs, but let's just say I was able to enjoy shopping that weekend a little more.

So How Does This Concern You?

Obviously I'm sharing this story because I'm incredibly proud of the results, and I know how inspirational that previous post I made was, so I wanted to give people a follow-up.

More importantly, I also wanted to point out what kind of things are possible once you have some authority built. Let's recollect what I did:

I came up with an offer in a short period of time

I wrote a quick post about the offer

I shared it with my email list

I launched the offer, and over the weekend sent a few reminder emails.

That's all I did to get this $40,000 revenue, but of course, the hard work was done months and years previously, so let this be a testament to why you should keep building your authority and keep growing your asset.

You might think you are doing a lot of work for nothing right now, but in a few years, you'll be doing a little work for a lot, and that's when you get to feel very grateful that you found Wealthy Affiliate and you stuck with it.

I take my hat off to you Dom. You came up with the idea and delivered. Special offers are obviously desirable even if they didn't know what they were getting :)

It wouldn't be so easy for me to run a campaign like this since my email list is only around 100 but I am hoping to increase that somehow with landing pages and maybe run a FB campaign to target subscribers.

Dom, you are an art and you found the art of doing this. I hope after all the basic learning then coming to learning the arts from you here, hopefully, I can come out with own styling art to ensure the ball starts rolling in the right alley!

Dom, what an inspirational post! What I like most about your success story, is it shows that you're just like the rest of us. About having a fear of failing. I'm glad you shared that part of your story. It's something we all can relate too. I'm glad your BF was a success too! I know next year you'll be even more ready for BF and you'll slam it twice as much!!

Excellent post, as always, Dom! I bet I know who's doing Black Friday promotions from now on :-).

I had two big takeaways from reading your post. They're actually related, and both hold so many people back, so I wanted to comment on them.

First, the right way to be unique - Success leaves traces. If you see pretty much every successful business on the planet implementing Black Friday promotions year after year after year, it's because they work...I mean REALLY work! Your uniqueness comes from your message, your authority, your relationships with your tribe, etc. You will not suddenly become "one of those slimy, hypey, money-grubbing salesmen" just because you follow a tactic that is proven to work. Your customers will appreciate it. If they know, like and trust you and are interested in what you offer, they'll appreciate those specials. Nobody complains about Amazon or Target...in fact, they fight to be first in line, right?

In other words, your uniqueness is created by your vision, your model, your position and your strategies, not by your tactics. Those foundational pieces will allow your to apply the tactic that everyone else is using, and do it in your own voice.

Second, measuring fear. We all instincitively know that fear costs us a lot, but your email stats actually give us a way to measure just how much.

Let's take the fear of seeming like another slimy salesman that stopped you last year, and nearly stopped you again this year (been there, done that, too!). In reality, you had one complaint. And you had 55 people who "voted with their wallets" for your BF offer. They loved your sale enough to spend significant money ($700+ average transaction) to grab it while they could.

Now we know 2 things. 1) The fear was massively exaggerated. 55 times more people loved your sale than hated it. And the rest were OK with it. Conclusion: BF was a huge plus.

2) We now know the cost, had you given to that fear and not moved forward...$40,000. And it wasn't even founded in reality. Ouch!

I challenge everyone reading this to identify your chief fear. Is it worth $40K to stay in your comfort zone? Only you can decide, but the question deserves asking. Just be ready to live with the answer that you give, not by your words, but your actions.

From experience, I actually know a 3rd thing (as I'm sure you do, too): that one complainer probably wasn't going to buy anything from you, anyway. Chances are he got on your list for a freebie, or out of curiosity. Which would you rather make happy - 55 paying customers who statistically probably will buy from you again, or 1 complainer who can not or will not buy your products and services, and who you will only hear from when he wants to complain? In my book, when it comes to income generation and wealth-building, he doesn't get a vote. I'll be glad to help him any way I can, but my focus is on acquiring, developing and satisfying customers. That's how you build a business.

Hi, Dom, that is so inspiring on so many different levels, for me, on the one hand, you are successful but still have doubts and concerns but just work through them and you're close out statement speaks volumes thank you, much-needed motivation.

Wow. I had some similar feelings about BF as I don't believe in it as a consumer ... ironically, since starting here at WA, I have begun to think about it as a business owner. However, since I am new, I passed on BF this year. My goal is to continue learning and prepare myself for next year. This is great inspiration.

"At this point, you're probably wondering how someone "successful" can still have doubts. It's simple really. If you're doing anything worth doing, you're going to have a fear of failure. What you get better at is coping with that fear."

Hello and thanks, that is very amazing and I know that the wealthy affiliate community is encourage even more to keep building their business because all the training and the hard work do pay off. Thanks again for sharing and wishing you the best of success.

Once your site starts earning you money, can you invest that money by buying other people's time. I didn't actually do the homepage on my site, I just came up with an idea of how I wanted it to look, and hired someone to do it for me. The more hours you can buy, the more you can achieve.

Thanks for the thoughts, Dom. I am getting there - I have taken the first step -WA- so, for now, they are baby steps...but hey, I am in it for the long haul. It will come. Nice job in any event.
Michelle

Thank you very much for the detailed process of how you brought this brilliant revenue generating promotion to life. It is also refreshing to share your emotions about the whole thing so that when we reach that stage we can be comforted to know that it is normal to feel fear and doubt and still prevail and persevere towards you goal.

Congratulations of a fruitful creative opportunity away from the mainstream. May your new service prosper you to greater heights.

MUCH RESPECT!!!
WOW, you have more monthly expenses than we do. And YES, our biggest concern is that our people get paid. We are the vision. they are the Business. My partners and I are all senior level IT Professionals so personal revenue is Never an issue. In addition, we can personally cover any shortfalls that we have... but that is not the goal. For us, Black Friday was off from normal... BUT the US Government approved our proposal and we got our first check from them last Thursday. This will mean Thousands of dollars per month for the foreseeable few years for us. After 2 years of trying, we pulled it off.

We have always made money so that in itself does not excite us. BUT Building something Unique does. We just moved our servers from Houston to Orlando and I have to get the office fully staffed. None of us are in Houston so moving our headquarters near NASA where my partner is was kind of a no-brainer for us.

As a services company, most of our revenue comes from Clients, not Customers. Congratulations.

This is excellent Dominic and a great follow up to the 0-10k post you did a while back.
I love that post and have pointed a few people towards it since I first saw it......hope you saw plenty of profit out of that launch, it would be well deserved.
Thanks for further inspiration Dom!!
Mark